A Vicious Circle

Comment from John B Wilding President, Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors

So, the railway experiment has failed, with the taxpayer, as usual, picking up the tab.

Once upon a time, there was a system of transportation called British Rail, I recollect that it used to work fairly well.

With a railway line at the end of the street where I was born and lived for 25 years, I had plenty of opportunity to 'train-spot'.

In search of economies a gentleman called Beeching decided to set a precedent - the effect of which is mirrored in recent developments within the railway industry.

To save money he merely closed the stations, ripped up the tracks and sold off the land.

No track, no trains, no cost.

Today, the parallel is that as the network grinds slower and slower with the timetables being continually the subject of ridicule, the selected answer is to reduce the number of trains.

Fewer trains, less need to juggle routing, more punctuality.

Of course that also means fewer people able (because of their own working hours) to travel conveniently by train, which of course means that the number of cars on the road increases.

So, British Rail passed away; privatised, failed and 'recreated'.

The new body, continuing to fail, then offers, as the only way to improve the network, to (of course) pump in more money.

Whose money? Taxpayers' money.

Strangely, in this scenario of failure, the farmed-out maintenance contractors went financially from strength to strength.

Who would not, having been given a virtual monopoly? The neverending dilemma is, of course, that unless the search for 'profit' is matched by stringent quality control (real quality control - not meaningless paper-chasing Quality Assurance Systems), the lowest-price syndrome is inevitable and with such procedures the likelihood of unacceptable performance is increased.

The result, as evidenced recently, has been failed lines, accidents and miles of track where train speeds' drop to 10-15mph for weeks and months on end.

And, who is paid overtime and acceleration cost to put right the mistakes? Could it be the same subcontractors who carried out the installations in the first place? Surely not! The Network faced with so much political and media pressure is removing the main contractor maintenance partners and taking the construction work back in-house.

Excellent decision, and I agree with the unions that this is well on the road (or should that be rail?) back to nationalisation, but guess how this is effected.

The tens of thousands of operatives, subcontractors and the like, who were employed by the dismissed main contractors are 'transferred'.

This is unacceptable, at the end of an instruction to a director, down to a manager, down to a foreman, is a 'worker' and the whole subject, the safety of the rail-traveller, is dependent upon that person.

That same 'worker' is the one whose failure to carry out work properly led to the dismissal of the main contractors.

What difference will it really make when the only apparent change is the printed name on the high-visibility jacket? The answer, I would suggest, is to start again with a clean sheet of paper.

Rewrite the 'book', get rid of the still-existing rules - regulations of the British Rail days that created overmanning and absence of 'value' and bring in labourers, machine-operators, managers and the like, from a non-rail background, in order that a new culture can be developed.

Am I advocating nationalisation? Yes, I am, because safety is paramount and, further, an efficient train service is the only way of stopping the crawl towards permanently gridlocked roads.

But, note the word 'efficient'.

Without efficiency and the lowered costs that go with the principle, then rail will not become the first transport choice and it must.

It really must!.

Back to top